Photographer Nitin Vadukul, who gave Eminem a chain saw, captured LL Cool J morphing into a superhero and portrayed Missy Elliott as Neo, the protagonist of the movie The Matrix, died on Feb. 17 in Manhattan, reports The New York Times. He was 52. His brother, the photographer Max Vadukul, said the cause was colorectal cancer, which had spread to the liver. Vadukul made use of Photoshop to turn his portraits of hip-hop stars into visual fantasies. For the January 2000 cover of The Source, then the leading hip-hop magazine, he surrounded Jay-Z with skyscraper gargoyles recalling Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film Metropolis.